NEW STRATEGIES

t really can be fun to watch the microcomputer games world from
a removed vantage point. I’ve touched upon this ground before but let’s just
have a little look at the latest manifestation of an age-old marketing
dilemma.

If you have a listen to your local commercial radio station (for we must
take the commercial airwaves as a suitable comparison), you will notice music
programs concerned with Folk, Country & Western, and perhaps Jazz, tucked
away at the end of the day’s schedule. Most of the music on these programs is
specialist interest with only the occasional well-known tune coming up.
However, when a well-known tune does come up, you think no less of it for being
on a specialist program, you just accept it for being the highly pleasant
material it is. No-one thinks any worse of Sting for producing a jazz-inspired
album, and it certainly was commercial, as its Number 1 position in the
American charts testified.

Now, back to computer games, and we have another outbreak of the ‘don’t tell
them it’s an adventure we want it to sell like an arcade’ syndrome. This mental
angst has it that adventure games sell far less than arcade games BECAUSE they
are not called arcade games, and takes no account of the facts which only
relate how very poor adventures sell next to none and good adventures sell very
well, it just so happens, due to the likes of the Quill, there are more
opportunities for the uninitiated to produce poor adventures.

The syndrome is sad because many adventure games really do sell in
tremendous numbers; Heavy on the Magick is a true adventure and it has
maintained a healthy chart position for months, if it continues to do well no
doubt it will cease to be an adventure and slide over to join Lords of
Midnight in the ‘successful strategy’ camp. Redhawk, from
Melbourne House, was deemed too important to be classified as an adventure, and
so was reviewed as a mainstream game. The game can not be counted a chart
success and so the attempts to confuse games players, and to ensure no
adventurer plays it, have presumably succeeded.

Dark Sceptre is the latest non-adventure about to hit the streets
and the latest release not to take into account the public’s total disregard
for such classificatory pedantics — they will buy a good game no matter what
the title. Let’s hope for less text and graphic products, and more
adventures.